Influencing students' observations

This article presents a study concerned with the influence of a descriptive introduction on occupational therapy students' perception of a child's behavior. Seventy-two students were divided into four groups. Each group received different information or set before seeing the same seven-minute videotape of a four-year-old boy doing a series of developmental tasks. This study measures the effect of prior information on the students' choice of descriptive words and on a narrative paragraph they wrote after seeing the videotape. Word choice results were significant at the .05 level for two of the four groups.